I've tried using VPN service providers (ibVPN in my case), in other countries. It worked except for outgoing email. I've since found out there is a work-around for this problem, unfortunately the service provider had no clue how to fix it. I was using openVPN (client software from the lucid repository); I believe that uses ssl, right?

One thing to watch out for is some kind of warning when the tunnel goes down. Some of this software lets you blithely continue on with no functioning tunnel so you think you are being private, but you aren't.

Another thing is to try to use a vendor not US based, and servers in countries other than US (England probably almost as bad). Netherlands is said to have a good privacy law and a good internet infrastructure too.

Sorry too long post to just say that being anon on internet can be a kind of illusion.

Guys I know too little so I should just shut up but being as pessimist as I am.

I mean think about it logically. How do them find people to look into.
those that behave differently to the masses. CCTV camera operators looks for movement that is not ordinary. Same with the private "cottage" firms that own their money by telling authorities about "unusual" behavior.

So say them are 10 or 100 such one man show firms that are desperate to get a month money to pay the bills. So them compete on a narrow niche and have to deliver. Why would them not tell about your going through two or three proxies.

would their gray zone sniffing catch that you use proxies? See me as noic or what the word is. Tin hat alu foil guy whatever. But I trust that to use proxies gives away that one have something to hide?

Is it not like all these "Road Warrior" tv thing them have following the Traffic police catching people that drive drunk or without insurance or paying tax or faked sings and so on. Them look for the odd behavior.

To use proxies can be seen as such can it not _________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

but why should anyone have the right to track/profile me if I am not breaking any laws?

why can I not surf the net privately without people keeping records of what I am looking at?

I am still having to explain to government departments why I do not have a bank account even though it should be my choice if I have one or not, I even refuse to have a mobile phone so they cannot track my movements.

I dont want to break any laws, I am just trying to make a stand against the system that is trying to add me to their databases to collect information that can be used to limit my and others freedom.

You are exactly right Stripe. It shouldn't be this difficult to have true internet anonymity. Nearly every website we go to keeps a record of our ip address. This to me, is the same as walking around with your home address tattooed on your forehead. It shouldn't be this way.

I have a mobile phone but I always keep it turned off unless I need to make a call. Can it be tracked when its turned off?

I am a lazy guy and I thought I set a book mark but it could ahve been while me tested a new puppy and it got lost when I ended without saving the save file.

But either it was Rory at BBC world service site or it was Register or Wired or some other such site that told about a cottage industry having hundreds of people working from home them being one person alone or a family or a whole group of people acting as a kind of civilian NSA or CIA or something them collecting info on other civil persons and then selling that info either to the Ad firms that love to have stats on everything and everybody or them sent the into the "Authorities" if them saw that as proper to do.

So my poor memory can have embellished the figures. Was it 50 or 70 or 150 such small "Firms"?

Anyway them used the best tracking them could find and tracked every person them got interested in and collected everything about them. Email name where we live what we look at and so on.

Total intelligence. Targeting people individually.

I think such should be illegal to do but them had that as their work and lived out of collecting such detailed info on ordinary persons.

So it is only pure luck if one not get targeted?

So that is why I had the idea that if one use proxies then the alarmbell goes off at say 50 such firms them having sniffers set up on servers all over the world?

Them being suspicious on anything them see as unusual. But I can be wrong. Maybe it was not 150 maybe only 70 or even as few as 50 in USA having that job but these 50 are at it 24/7 collecting everything we do._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

Oh man, tell me about losing bookmarks and typed-up texts due to constant puppy savefile upgrades and overfills. (One wishlist feature of mine is for Geany (or whatever) to not allow Shutdown to commence if it has an unsaved file open!)

But as to your point.. haven't seen that story yet, but it reminds me of my peeve-- apps that go phoning "home" over the net without asking. In particular we have gnome-mplayer (hosted on code.google as opposed to sf.net-- hmmr..), which dials into Amazon and tells them what the name of your local-harddrive mp3 file is that you're playing, ostensibly for the purposes of your swell added pleasure of seeing some thumbnail of what it thinks is the album cover that matches. Surely they're as much in the database collection/selling business as is a company like Google.. the latter having this as a huge agenda-- and I only recently learned that they're the big money behind Mozilla, which is likely why Firefox ships with Google right there on the Nav bar, Out of the Box (the 1st thing I remove, every time!). And if anyone's ecoconscious, note that Goog stores tons of copies of every query your IP does on servers globally.. huge consumption of that swell coal and nuke power.

In Wyoming we have grizzly bears, a lot of them. There is a joke about hiking in the woods here. They say if a bear comes after you, you don't have to run faster than the bear to survive (an impossibility anyway). You only have to run faster than at least one person you are with.

Actually it is unwise to run from bears, but this joke gets the point across. Yes nooby, since governments have near infinite resources, they can track any particular person if they have a mind to. But how would they have a mind to?

There are already vast amounts of encrypted traffic flying around the internet. Your own little packets are not going to draw any attention. Even if the govt has software on ISP servers and detects your encrypted packets going to a VPN server, what can they do with that? Nothing. Can the US govt strongarm the owner of a VPN server in Russia? Maybe, with a hell of a lot of effort. But why expend that effort? Most people using that server are not important enough.

Claire Wolfe used to say that we ought to put words like "bomb" and "assassinate" at the bottom of every email we send, thus making governments have to sort through vast piles of emails to find anything. Flood the system. Well we don't have to do that intentionally; it is already being done without intention. The more government goes on about terrorism, the more people talk about it, giving government more junk to sort through. Government is not omnipotent. The kind of people in government are usually the kind not smart enough or hard working enough to make it in the private economy. They are seat warmers, paper shufflers. Not the sort to get your panties in a bind about.

We might as well all leave our homes and vehicles unlocked, because any determined thief can get by any reasonable defense. Yet we still lock our doors. We don't have to have perfect defenses. We just have to be a little better than average, make the cost of penetrating our defenses a little higher.

I am on an email list for homeschoolers in another state. This list has about a thousand members. Often new ones come on, asking about homeschooling, and the first thing they ask is what they have to do to make it legal with the state (that is, to register as homeschoolers). I have over the years many times told those people that if they are smart, they won't register with the state. Others on the list confirm that. It's just less bureacratic crap to put up with; and the education of your kids is your concern, not the government's. And, we are almost certain that this list is monitored by the state education bureacracy, the most powerful special interest in the state. Yet I have never received a phone call from an educrat. No educrat has bothered to even post on the list, saying what I am recommending is against the law. There are very many people in this state ignoring homeschooling law, and the government either doesn't know what to do about it, or doesn't care. I could easily be found by them, but the last thing they want (I think) is to deal with an outraged father. What they do want, is to push their papers around, draw a nice wage for doing nothing, and a fat pension.

It's easy to be too scared about government. Governments depend on people voluntarily complying with the law. When people don't want to comply, then there is mostly nothing government can do about it. In fact the entire practice of homeschooling in the US was established not by governments passing laws allowing it (which they eventually got around to doing, later), but by parents ignoring laws requiring them to put their kids in school.

Quote:

but why should anyone have the right to track/profile me if I am not breaking any laws?

Well, rights are a fantasy. They sure don't protect you; ask the ghosts of the dead Afghans and Iraqis. This is not about rights, it's about practicality. It makes sense to put some effort into privacy, and to not just throw up your hands in despair.

I have never tested but does not some complain the surfing will be slow when many are active? and to use TOR is like saying to authorities that hey I do somethin so bad that I need TOR so that is like asking for trouble already there?

but sure I can be wrong. Them maybe don't have time to look into all who do it. But if you live in a small place and are the only one doing it then they get curious because them know your Dad and Mom from Church _________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

I have never tested but does not some complain the surfing will be slow when many are active? and to use TOR is like saying to authorities that hey I do somethin so bad that I need TOR so that is like asking for trouble already there?

I have a mobile phone but I always keep it turned off unless I need to make a call. Can it be tracked when its turned off?

Them know for at least 6 months where you where the last 6 months you used it.

Say you use it once at home then once in CentralStation in inner City then once at a Cafe in OldTown and then you don't use it for days but when you visit a friend to call for a Taxi? I only guess. But them know exactly where you where when doing these calls for the last 6 months here in Sweden.

Not sure about USA and if you are in City then you are triangular to within some 100 meters but in a rural area there can be miles between stations so them can only say you where close to one out of three stations._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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